There are five things I've been meaning to write about, but rather than pick one at random I'm going to give summaries of them all. If anyone wants to see any of these realised as a full essay, they are to email me or ping me on IRC with their preference.

Metatropes Considered - This morning Joe Geldart asked whether “pretentious, posing, poor estonian places” are a metatrope for me. It's only been a couple or few weeks since I coined the word metatrope, but it already seems to have a greater mindshare than anything else I've contrived on Whits. What is a metatrope? I've considered some of the properties of metatropes further, so as to better define them. Possibly to include a list of my own metatropes, expressed in the kind of shorthand notation that is normal for jotting them down.

Complexity and Diplomacy - Would start with an anecdote about how Sam Ruby composed some of his 2003 essays about the Atom syndication format; his method is very subtle, and full of diplomacy. Then to constrast that with my Ditching the Semantic Web?, which caused a lot of misunderstanding because the broad summary, my boycotting of RDF, was the only thing that really sunk in, and the rationale behind that became a point to which people were oblivious. Ed Summers said he thought there was some dishonesty to it, that there was a hidden part of the story; whereas I considered it one of my most desperately honest of essays. I think it cut close to the mark for a lot of Semantic Web developers, which is why the positive aspects of my post, of alternatives that are good to work on, and the compelling nature of the community, were ignored. Comparisons to Chettle's apology of the Groatsworth of Wit, and of the interplay between the primary participants in Pantisocracy.

Design Patterns vs. Mini-Models - How do design patterns compare to mini-models? Are they the same thing? I've been thinking that it was wrong of me to try to list all of my patterns, as I started to do at the beginning of 2007. They just become a clatter. Instead, to concentrate on weeding out the ones that matter. I think that each of the similar terms—schema, pattern, idea, design, vision, model—have particular aspects to them that justify their desynonymisation.

Faith and Practice - One thing that's been bothering me about religion is the connection between faith and practice. The Quaker “manual”, if you like, is called Quaker Faith and Practice. But modern Quakerism is a lot different from the early days of the movement, before 1680 or so, when it was a very radical thing. As usual, the resultant is concentrated on rather than the vector; what if religions concentrated on that aspect of conduct? The Catholic church have just updated the list of sins with a set of new modern sins. Sins seem to supplement the secular law by providing stringent guidelines of how to conduct yourself.

The Very Consideration - An outline of some of the design patterns and mini-models that I've been working on which comprise my current philosophical meanderings. These include: the very consideration, which is the idea that perceptions and connotations etc. are first class things in themselves, often not seen as such; loudmouth democracy, that “one person, one vote” democracy can be subverted by convincing others, and that a similar process is what happens in history, in that it's whichever historian shouts loudest that can bring attention most to a subject; and transformative chains, an idea that's come on from my simple initial model of Shakespeare's plays and their development as being different stages of one sublime phantasmagorium, rather than ups and downs in a transitive quantifiable scale.